Udupi – How the Deities of Krishna came to Udupi

The amazing story of how the Baala Krishna Deity crossed the ocean from faraway Dvaarakaa in Northwest India to Udupi in the south is told in Madhva-vijaya, the biography of Shrila Madhvaacaarya. Madhva wanted to have a temple of Lord Krishna in Udupi. Well, it so happened that in Dvaarakaa, one of the main places of Krishna?s pastimes on earth five thousand years ago, a Deity lay concealed within a large mass of gopi-candana clay (the yellowish clay Vaisnavas use daily in marking their freshly bathed bodies as temples of Lord Vishnu). No one knew the Deity was there, but because the lump of clay was exceedingly heavy, some sailors loaded it onto their merchant ship as ballast. On the ship?s southward journey, just off the coast of Udupi, a tempest blew the ship aground on a sandbank.

On that very day, Shrila Madhvaacaarya absorbed in composing Dvaadasha-stotra, his famous twelve-part poem praising Lord Krishna, had gone to the beach to bathe or, as some say, to receive the Lord. Upon seeing the ship caught fast on the sandbank and hearing the cries of the sailors in distress, Shrila Madhvaacaarya waved his cloth in their direction. This calmed the stormy seas, and the ship floated free. Madhva then guided the vessel to safety. Eager to show his appreciation, the captain offered Madhva whatever he wanted from the ship?s cargo. Madhva chose the heavy lump of gopi-candana clay.Disciple – attendants of Madhvaacaarya had just started back to Udupi with the large lump of clay when, but a short distance from the beach, the lump broke in two, revealing the handsome Deity of Lord Baala Krishna and The deity of Balarama which Madhavacharya installed at Malpe beach, in the Vadabhandeshwara temple. The Krishna deity, he brought to Udupi, and installed in his Matha there.But now the combined effort of thirty of Madhva?s disciples could not budge the Deity. Only when Madhvaacaarya himself embraced and lifted the Deity as if He were a child did the Deity consent to be moved. In great transcendental ecstasy Madhva carried the Lord the four miles back to Udupi. On the way he completed the remaining seven parts of Dvaadasha-stotra, reciting the verses out loud. Back in Udupi, Madhva bathed the Lord in the lake known as Madhva-sarovara and enshrined Him in the ShriKrishna Matha.

Shrila Madhvaacaarya instituted rigorous standards for worshipping ShriKrishna, and whenever he was in Udupi he would personally perform the thirteen daily worship ceremonies for the Lord.
How the Deity of Baala Krishna had come to be buried in Dvaarakaa is told in a work from the seventeenth century by Raghuvarya Tirtha, an aacaarya in succession from Shrila Madhvaacaarya. Once, during the time of Lord Krishna?s manifest pastimes on earth, mother Devaki lamented to the Lord over her misfortune at never having witnessed the Lord?s childhood pastimes in Vrindaavana. She entreated the Lord to make her happy and fortunate, like mother Yashodaa, by showing some of His childhood feats and frolics.